MEMORY : Journey to the Center of the Mind

A Hypertext Exploration of Memory and Mind
by John William Schmidt

Preface
Why take an Historical Approach to Memory?
Visual effects and metaphors
Introduction to Memory
History of Memory
Mythology of Memory
Philosophy of Memory
Psychology of Memory
Artificial Memory
Classical Biology of Memory
Molecular Biology of Memory
Memory Medicine
Pseudoscience of Memory
Quantum Computation, Consciousness, and Memory
Phenomonology of Memory
Sociology of Memory
The Beginnings of Synthesis: Cognitive Science
Consilience Within the Study of Memory and Mind
Formulating a New Memory Myth
Glossary of Terms
Index 
reading list

There is a Hopi prophecy concerning what is called the 'Thirteenth Tribe', being the new global tribe which emerges from the union of the 'Twelve Tribes', the diverse people of humanity. As an alternative to the flat map of the memory terrain shown in the memoropoly board above, there is a three dimensional version where each edge of the cube represents one of the 12 tribes of memory researchers. Maybe if we can induce a state of cooperation between these diverse approaches to memory, we will be able to form a unified 'Thirteenth Tribe' that finally attains enlightenment.

The first of the twelve tribes. Myths about memory and knowledge are found in many cultures. Myths are a kind of cultural memory. It has been learned in this century (1900's) that our closest relatives, the chimps, have a small amount of cultural knowledge. Thus, it is safe to say that humans have been accumulating cultural knowledge ever since the human lineage split off from the chimp lineage.....for about 5,000,000 years.

At first, all cultural knowledge had to be transmitted from person to person and kept in the minds of individuals as personal memories. As soon as humans evolved (one of the special things about the human brain is the large number of direct connections from the conscious motor control centers to our fingers) the ability to fashion fine tools that were worthy of being kept and carried, people began to create representations of worldly objects that were meaningful and useful. Maps, calanders, animals were all carved into the surfaces of tools and dwellings. Icons and symbols began to evolve within the various tribes. After millions of years of accumulation of cultural icons and other knowledge, how were people to explain the long-forgotten origins of such knowledge?

Myth
It seems natural for people to try to explain the source of human knowledge in terms of mystical relationships between people and other parts of the world. This is an interesting state of affairs. Why not simply assume that our human ancestors created all of human knowledge through their experiences in the world?

My guess is that humans experienced millions of years of very gradual changes in cultural knowledge, a type of glacial accumulation of knowledge that made it impossible for most people to either be involved in creating new knowledge or even knowing anyone who came up with a new way of doing something. For the most part, through out the long haul of human history, people have simply learned how their parents did things and then went through life doing things the same way. A clear concept of change and creation through human initiative is a modern concept.

Thus, the oldest of the "12 tribes" were the earliest humans who attempted to account for the mysterious origins of human knowledge by formulating various creation myths; pleasing and satisfying stories of the origins of human knowledge. It would certainly be rather mundane to create stories such as "Great Uncle Harry invented an easy way to make fire, and the rest of us bozos have used it ever since." As Hollywood teaches, the really popular stories are full of adventure and exciting characters. The cerebral Uncle Harry is not a box office winner. It does not seem surprising that the popular stories that would get passed from generation to generation were the stories involving colorful gods and godesses and other memorable gimicks.

The god and godesses of folklore are interesting windows on the human mind. If we compare mythical figures from many human cultures can we find some common features? Here, we are centering out attention on mythical stories about the sources of knowledge, memory, and how these key aspects of human mental existence fit in to our over-all relationship with the world.

The Sociobiology of Folk Tales and Myths
Many philosophers have been interested in an aspect of human cognitition called the "intentional stance" by Dan Dennett. The basic idea behind "the intentional stance" is that we go through life with the expectation that other people will bahave in the same way that we would behave if we were in their place. (Look at this to get an idea of how modern neuroscience is tracking the "intentional stance" to the mechanical components of the human brain.) This powerful behavioral strategy has been built into our genes, but it is a flexible strategy that can be applied by humans to non-human animals and inanimate objects as well. When we take the intentional stance, human thoughts naturally fill with imaginings of thinking and talking animals and various types of panpsychism are found in many cultures. Thus, ancient myths are full of human-like animals and gods.

Why bother with ancient memory myths in this age of a modern science of memory? Because there are several ways of knowing, science only being one of them. In modern science, a technical, jargonistic description of reality is produced that is understood only by an elite group. The second half of any scientific discovery is the translation of the jargonistic result into a plain-text account that is accessible to everyone. This translation process is essential to science itself, because if knowledge remains bound up in jargon, science itself comes to a halt. But more important, if knowledge is to be integrated into human society, it must pass into the vernacular. Priests can lead the way, but if the masses cannot understand the priests, the whole game degenerates into slavery. Slavery is an ancient human institution, but it is abhorant to the modern mind.

{analogy of this "slavery" to the RNA World that was replaced by the Central Dogma; a required first form, but unstable, replaced by the more stable final form, "dogma"}

The Central Dogma of Scientific Memetics: All statements in scientific jargon originate in every-day language and can be translated into Folk-knowledge, myth. Myth then feeds back to regulate the production of more jargon.

This is entirely analogous to the central dogma of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes Protein, and proteins regulate the production of RNA. A diagram can illustrate the relationships:

In biology, DNA is a genetic storage molecule, the source template for the production of RNA molecules. Inside human cells, DNA stays inside the cell nucleus acting as the master copy of an individual's genetic instructions. RNA molecules carry the functional units of the human blue print out of the nucleus to the ribosomes. The ribosomes translate the molecular structure of RNA molecules into the molecular structure of protein molecules. It is the protein molecules which do the work of the body.....movement, metabolism, memory. One of the many jobs for proteins is to control which of all the available genes gets copied into RNA at any given time.

In science as a functioning whole, the everyday language of the spoken word is the means of producing jargon. Science trains its monks in an art by which ordinary language is converted or transcribed into precise hypotheses that can be efficiently and objectively evaluated by observation and experimentation. The results of the scientific method are also in the form of specialized jargon. In biology, RNA is a special molecule that is a transient or ephemeral intermediate between the billion year continuities of genomes and phenotypes. Scientific jargon is just as ephemeral, if it is not soon translated back into a more stable form, its information content can be lost, forcing a necesity of rediscovery upon a later generation of scientists. A good example is Gregor Mendel's discovery of the basic rules of genetic inheritance. In biology, proteins are produced by the process of translation, and proteins are generally the stable work horses that produce a phenotype. What is the equivalent of protein in the world of science?

The word "myth" originally referred to stories that came by way of an oral tradition. However, we now have the idea of "modern myth" that is the product of a literate society. Still, it is not uncommon for contemporary ideas to arise within the domain of the spoken word and then to pass into written form. In memetics, myths are the vernacular, culturally stable forms of transient jargonistic hypotheses. In biology, some proteins feedback to regulate the production of RNA. Other proteins actually have the job of forming the structure of the organism and carrying out all of the functional tasks that are life, including the production and repair of DNA molecules. In human society, myths function to provide us with meaning and they shape the evolution of language itself.

This is all fine and easily managed as long as it is applied to "mesoscale" phenomena. The intentional stance can be applied to gods and spirits and a coherent intentional model of reality can be constructed. In the Western tradition, perfect gods of the celestial domain control the imperfect phenomena of the human domain in much the same way that DNA reaches out from the nucleus to direct the activity of proteins. Christianity even has its version of RNA, Jesus, the intermediate between God and man.

But what happens when science leads us into the unfamiliar worlds of microscopic phenomena or towards the truth about the celestial domain? Suddenly the intentional stance fails.....molecules and stars are impersonal, there is nothing human about them. A modern science leads towards a mythology that can not be formulated in the form of human intentions. The human mind has often failed to get past this shocking failure of the intentional stance. We are genetically programmed to interpret the world in terms of human inclinations and intentions. The Christian gnostics drew a line in the sand: they rejected as currupt and evil anything in human experience that points us towards an inhuman materialistic mechanics of reality. In their dualistic view, the rightious man must gravitate towards an imagined world of spirit where the intentional stance can never be questioned. The rather strange philosophy of Plato was revived and fielded in support of the Christian world view, setting Western philosophy on an anti-materialistic course.

Modern science is the inheritor of a 2,000 year long split between myth construction within the domain of religion and and theory construction within science. For 2,000 years, our culture's myth builders have viewed scientific knowledge and materialism as leading down a path away from the godhead. The practitioners of science have tended to avoid the task of myth construction because they have viewed myths as inherently restricted to the domain of mistaken, intentionality-oriented folk tales. Yes, it is possible to train people to think about the world in mechanistic terms and to leave the ancient myths from the intentional stance behind. Millions of scientists do this. But what about the majority of people who never get the required indoctrination into the materialistic world view? We exist in a world with antagonists who form ranks within the "two cultures". Materialistic scientists scoff at the pre-scientific beliefs of those who place spirit in dominion over matter. The spiritualists view materialistic science as the work of the devil. Most people are left in the middle with an unsatsfying disconnect between religious mythology and scientific theory. What is the way out of this antagonism? Can a study of human history and human nature teach us anything about how to move beyond this cultural battle field?

Within the process by which science operates in the memosphere, myth is not just some quaint historical error that must be replaced by a scientific world view. Myth and science must work together in an eternal braided whole to generate useful human knowledge. This is the basic human survival strategy, and any attempt to fragment this process and argue about the dominance of one of its components over another is silly. It is my intention to go into the modern scientific view of memory in conciderable detail, but this MUST be done in the context of myth because I am not interested in just repeating the jargon of memory science. The main goal here is to promote a healing of humanity through strengthening and exploring the unity of the Central Dogma's claim of a tight relationship between science and myth.

Modern society is suffering from a type of poisoning, a type of unconscious scholasticism, by which the rapid scientific progress is not matched by equally rapid translation of the fruits of science into forms (I'll use the term "myth" as a simple term to describe these "forms") which can be integrated into the bulk of human society. Science has accelerated the transcription process and now the social organism must react by accelerating the translation process. Science has produced a glut of facts that need to be integrated into all aspects of society. This in no way implies that all of the technological implications of science need to be integrated into society.....many need to be rejected. But such choices need to be made on the basis of understanding, not on the basis of ignorance and fear.

As revolutionary as the growth of modern science has been, it has created an imbalance in human society that is in the process of being corrected. I think that the internet holds the promise of providing important tools for rapid translation of science jargon into myth. Traditionally, there was a slow process by which scientists would chat and spin off myths which would slowly diffuse out of the cloistered world of the scientific monks into society at large. As scientists became increasingly specialized and removed from contact with other segments of society, scientific myth production fell dangerously short of what is required for a healthy society. With the internet, it is now possible for the "chat" of scientists to be a public process, instantaneously accessible to the entire social organism. A much expaned system of information exchange between scientists, educators, journalists, artists, theologians, and all segments of society is needed. One of the goals of these web pages is to point non-specialists towards participation in these exciting new conduits and communication channels between scientists and the public at large. It is up to all of us to modify human society into a new configuraation in which there is greater overall participation in the production of science myth. We CAN successfully use the internet to harness the torrent of information flowing from modern science.

In order to promote modern myth making, we need to look at ancient myth making and understand its role in producing Western Culture. If we remember what the role of myth has been in the past, we can then focus on the task of explicitly making myth the important partner of science that it should be. A key theme of these web pages on Memory is the idea that the history of humanity can be defined as a process of making explicit what was previously implicit. Consciousness raising has always been the business of mankind. I will not be blindly rummaging through ancient myths hoping for enlightenment to suddenly leap into our minds. We are focused on science. How did Western Culture get where it is now, with two cultures: the scientific and the traditional? How can we learn from the past so that we can construct a Third Culture that acts to unify science and non-science? So I will be exploring those ancient myths that are related to science (knowledge) itself. As part of the theme of making things explicit, we will focus beyond knowledge and emphasize the role of memory as the medium of knowledge and science. Of course, science has also made memory the explicit object of scientific investigation, not just the implicit ocean upon which the ship of science sails. We need to understand how the Central Dogma of Scientific Memetics arose, how it functions and how it got us where Western Society is today. Then we will see what to do to clear up the "translation bottle-neck" that is inhibiting the proper growth of Western Society.

One key aspect of my analysis of the relation between language, science, and myth concerns the origin of classical Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy was an influential force in the development of Western Society as we know it. I want to focus on the role of the the Greek alphabet in allowing Greek philosophy to flower and spread. Since Western Culture also stems from Judeo-Christian roots, it will be useful to us to recall the mythical origins of Greek and Hebrew. We can go into this venture with two puzzles in mind that can give our journey guidance:

1) When Moses recieved the ten commandments, what language were they written in?
    An alternative wording of this question may be more appealing to some people:
    what script was used the first time that the ten commandments were written down?
     This question will lead to natural follow-up questions such as:
      how did the law of Moses come to dominate the Western world,
       and take dominion over mythogenesis?

and

2) What was the source of the Greek alpahabet, the first complete alphabet?
     This question is not in search of a person's name,
      but rather the cultural source of the idea that it is can be useful to explicitly
       (yes, again this theme of the explicit!) write out every vowel.
        We take this for granted, but for the first 2,000 years of writing,
         most writing did not involve a complete alphabet.
         When the Greeks adopted a complete alphabet, were
          Alexander the Great, the Greek Bible, Christianity,
            and Modern Science in some sense inevitable?

Prehistory of Memory  The story of memory starts before written history and was passed to us from an oral tradition of story telling and mythology.

History of Memory

Although the Greeks invented a separate god of forgetting (Lesmosyne, see Greek Mythology of Memory), it is almost as if most people forget about forgetting. Some people have claimed that we never forget, we just have problems remembering what is in a perfect memory store. The modern view is that memory storage is an active, constructive process with multiple stages in the memory storage process. Short-term memory recall usually seems better because we store more details and information in forms of memory that only last a short while. For most people, there is a lot of filtering such that very little is actually committed to long-term memory compared to what is temporarily stored as temporary memory.

A person's memories are personal possesions, but as social primates, we share access to the memories in other people's brains through communication. Human language is one means by which people can share their memories with each other. There have been several attitudes about the power of language to share memories. In some cases, language has become a dominating influence, the center of intellectual activity, while in other cultures language has been seen as a distraction from true human reality.

In some cultures, spoken language was recognized along with other art forms as a powerful way to share stories and pass them on to the future. In such orally transmitted cultures, attempts were made to find the most efficient ways to remember lengthy spoken epics. Interest in the practicalities of rembering and forgetting have always remained a major preoccupation of humans, even after the development of tools for externalizing the storage of linguistic texts by writing and the use of computers. {link here to pseudoscience: popular "methods" books for improving memory} Often this practical issue has been considered to be one of quantity, as if our minds had a certain amount of room for the storage of memories. We can refer to this issue as the problem of quantity.

One of the common human cultural elements is belief in non-material souls. Exact details of what a soul might be have been quite variable, ranging from sub-individual infectious spirits to individual souls to conceptions of a single communal soul universal in scope. The dualistic distinction between crass material objects and the non-materiality of souls is a common aspect of traditional soul concepts. Importantly, memories are usually conceptualized as being something associated with the human spirit, not some particular physical human body. {point to philosophy, Plato, Descartes, Bergson}

This common assumption, that memories were something non-material, is important because this is a mistaken assumption. One of the great human triumphs is realization that memory and all human thought is EMBODIED. Our material brains produce, store and utilize our memories through physical brain actvity. The history of memory must be viewed in terms of a fantastic journey of discovery whereby people escaped from the natural tendency to assume that memories are non-material. {point here to biology, James, Edelman} [Lakoff (Philosophy in the Flesh) mentions people like Edelman as way by which Philosophers and Cognitivists become aware of importance of embodiment of mind, response of philosophy to biology, also Vitalism example] {use Lakoff as bridge from cognitive science to greater cross-disciplinary efforts}

Memory/thought dichotomy. Axis from raw, superficial perception to deepest, most meaningful thinking. Path to Von Neuman architecture. Modern idea of memory and processing all in same place in brain. {link to artificial memory}

After a look into the Myth of Memory, I will attempt to explore how the pre-literate foundations were built upon by philosophers such as the Greeks. We will be exploring the boundary between human oral traditions and the means by which the earliest human writings have survived to reach us. Go here for some comments on ancient libraries. Out of the Judaic knowledge myths, we will have to follow the development of Christianity and its influence on both Midevil philosophy and the development of modern science.

Philosophy of Memory.

We must examine early human written history for clues to how pre-literate oral traditions changed into our modern view of memory. It makes sense to first try to understand the mythology of memory that pre-dated written history. By doing so we can attempt to put ourselves into the cultural setting from which the first philosophers of memory and mind were working out from. The emphasis of this section which deals with the Second of the 12 Tribes, will be on Western philosophy, with only minor reference to Eastern thought. The reason for this is that science is the product of Western thought, and we want to trace the continuity of pre-scientific philosophy into the domain of scientific investigations.

As mentioned above, an important dimension for analysis of memory has always been the issue of quantity. How many things can a person remember? A related issue is the problem of quality. Just how good are memories at recording and replaying human experiences? We now know that human memory storage is an active process whereby memories are constructed from on-going brain activity. The mechanism of human memory storage is limited by the mechanical components of the brain that carry out the building of our memories. However, the details of how the microscopic cells and molecule of a brain store memories have only recently become accessible to analysis. The early history of human thought about memory was dominated by what people imagined about how memories might be stored.

A common pre-scientific metaphor for memory was the idea of a reflection. It was basic common sense that  when a physical object interacted with the senses, some reflection of that external physical object was captured by the mind. Just as a reflection on a lake was non-material, a memory in the mind was thought to be non-material. Just as a reflection on the surface of a lake could be smooth and clear or rough and fragmented, so too are human memories of variable quality.

It is clear that in early Greek philosophy there were both materialistic monists and mind/body dualists. "Nature abhors a vacuum" (source?) It is also the case that the human brain prefers to label and describe the unseen and unsensed rather than simply leave it as a blank unknown. The classic example is the human blind spot [explain] First record of it? What was the common human response to the existence of things that could not be explained? We could say that mythology abhors a vacuum. Two great types of myth arose to account for the invisible: non-material spirits and invisibly small atoms. The earlies recorded Greek philosophies contain both of these ideas. Today, we know that the materialists who first proposed that tiny unseen atoms exist have been vindicated, but the idea of non-material aspects of reality has not been religated to the past. Matter/spirit dualism is a fluid belief paradigm; as materialists explain more and more of the world in terms of atoms and molecules, the dualists retreat closer and closer to a core conviction that the human soul, if nothing else, cannot be exlained in materialistic terms. The history of memory must be analysed in terms of the advance of a meterialistic understanding of memory and the corresponding shrinkage in what remains for spirits to accomplish. It is easy to explore the history of memory in terms of this battle between materialism and dualism, but it must also be mentioned that most humans have probably not made a very clear distinction in their personal conceptualization of what memories are. Our memories come to us automatically. Who really needs to worry about their nature as long as they do their job? This pragmatic attitude would have been dominant outside of special circumstances that pressed memory to its limits. Eventually, casts (or outcasts) of thinkers confronted the nature of memory. Simple attributions of memory to spirits, gods, atoms, reflections or other imagined sources were no longer concidered adequate explanations.  

Specific Philosophers.